After more than fifty years, my father is going through his letters. This daunting task involves unloading a green Army duffel bag full of papers, and probably mice, as well as decoding ancient computer data dating back to a time when floppy discs actually flopped. He’s been wanting to do…
Kirk Montgomery, entertainment reporter for Channel 9, didn’t hear the routine about him on KOA radio a few weeks back. But he certainly heard about it. Montgomery has never publicly discussed whether or not he’s gay, nor have most of his peers, including Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and…
If you’re in Manhattan feeling frisky and need a workout this Saturday morning, leave your empty beer glass on the mahogany in Martin’s and briskly walk the five furlongs to Penn Station. There. All done. Now board the 10:31 train, hunt for a cozy spot in the bar car and…
When Worst Comes to Qwest The numbers game: Stuart Steers’s “Wring Out the Old,” in the May 23 issue, was the best-written article I have read yet on the downfall of US West (Worst), now known as QWEST Worst! The article was readable and understandable, and it was so nice…
Late afternoon, Panorama Park, Wheat Ridge. Greg Storozuk stands beneath a pine tree. Sprinklers hiss in the background, a breeze blows in from the north, a kid rolls by on a scooter, the May sun burns through a milky sky. “To any question in life,” he begins, “the answer is…
Phil Carpenter supervises Grandview Cemetery in Fort Collins. Over the years, he’s uncovered his share of unusual problems. Grandview was built in 1887. Back then, administrators weren’t exactly meticulous about their records. In fact, at the turn of the last century and well into the Great Depression, when poverty and…
Jim Schwartz lives in Centennial, in a home with a sign on the front door announcing that visitors are entering “The Dog House.” When guests ring the doorbell, the refrain from the pop song “Who Let the Dogs Out” plays over a speaker, and Schwartz’s three large black poodles begin…
Home- and private-school students who want to take classes on the Web scored a small victory in May when the Colorado Legislature passed a bill allowing a limited number of them to enroll in online public schools. But for Pam Benigno, the victory was too small. Benigno, who directs the…
Tuesday was the day former Glendale city manager Veggo Larsen was expecting a $100,000 check from his former employers. But instead of a nest egg, he got a goose egg. That’s because Glendale’s city council voted last week to hold off on honoring the May 7 separation agreement (which also…
The death of Dr. Steven Mostow, an infectious-diseases specialist and associate dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, certainly didn’t go unnoticed in Denver. The 63-year-old professor, known as Dr. Flu, died on March 24 when the twin-engine plane he was piloting crashed near Centennial Airport in Douglas…
On May 12, two days after his departure from the Denver Post, longtime columnist Chuck Green told KHOW talk-show host Peter Boyles he hadn’t resigned from the paper, as the Post had reported, and insisted that after 34 years of faithful service, he’d been sent packing without even receiving “cab…
Unbeknownst to most of his acquaintances, Joe McCleary leads a double life. By day, his job is to lovingly tend 105 or so acres of the most green-velvety, luscious, ease-down-on-the-ground-and-take-a-nap-looking rye/Kentucky bluegrass hybrid this side of the Front Range. But at night, he heads for his suburban Aurora home, where…
Waste Not, Want Not Unsafe at any speed: I don’t know why Patricia Calhoun thinks South Carolina should be happy to take the waste that Colorado doesn’t want (“Deliverance,” May 23). Or why she thinks that all the states between Colorado and South Carolina should have to endure plutonium shipments…
Jeri Aiello feels like she grew up at the phone company. She started at the Mountain States Telephone Company in 1962, when she was just sixteen. A friend of her mother’s worked there and told her the company was hiring operators. The job was part-time but had full benefits, so…
Colorado now has five murderers marking time on death row. Several hundred other violent criminals are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, and more than one member of that group has suggested that execution might be a more merciful fate than decades of isolation behind bars. But out…
On the eve of her entry into adult life, Debbie Baker had a change of heart that would alter her destiny. “I didn’t like Barbie when I was a little girl,” she says. “I liked baby dolls to play with.” All of that changed in 1978, when a friend gave…
Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court determined that Jefferson County prosecutor Mark Pautler had broken ethical rules governing a lawyer’s conduct when he represented himself as a public defender while talking on the phone to William Cody Neal, the now-convicted ax murderer who killed three women during a grisly spree…
At this 7 a.m. meeting of the Cherry Creek Toastmasters, Topicmaster Susan Grattino throws out questions loosely related to Mother’s Day. In return, she expects an extemporaneous speech, no longer or shorter than 45 seconds. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,” she says. “How is that…
Critics of Denver Post owner Dean Singleton see him as a skinflint, but over the past several years his words and deeds regarding the capstone of his newspaper empire belie this tag. He’s spent money freely to boost the paper’s “We Cover the World” reputation, albeit with just a modest…
The vast majority of American men have nothing more in common with major-league baseball players than an occasional hangnail and the right to a jury trial. Most of us couldn’t hit a beach ball thrown by an eight-year-old, much less Randy Johnson’s heater, and whenever we execute the hit-and-run, there’s…
This Property Is Condemned Waste-watchers: Douglas Bruce is my hero! He should run for governor of Colorado. Alan Prendergast’s “Vendetta,” in the May 16 issue, was a perfect example of useless, blood-sucking government bureaucrats (about half of the government’s employees), so-called public servants who really have nothing better to do…
Bastards. Idiots. Liars. Crooks. Bastard idiot lying crooks. Douglas Bruce doesn’t mince words. Charm and cajolery are not his strong suits. The state’s foremost anti-tax activist has been known to accuse state legislators of being both exceedingly greedy and hopelessly stupid, to question their sanity as well as their honesty,…
